Edit: I meant less than a century ago! My bad! Just a brain fart.
In: 9783
The core of it is that after WW2 and particularly starting in the 60s-70s we welcomed the widespread participation of women in the workforce under 2nd wave feminism (1st wave was the vote, 3rd wave was politics and punk, 4th wave is woke). This added a huge amount of potential workers in the economy, which devalued individual jobs. It’s basic supply and demand: if you have more supply for workers and the same demand in terms of jobs, then each worker brings home less money.
It’s a bit more complicated, of course. Lower class women were already in the workforce since forever, so 2nd wave feminism mostly affected the middle class. Even then, not every middle class woman worked full time or at all, so it’s not as if the pool of workers doubled, exactly. But it was still a lot. Women in the workforce also relied in part on the sexual revolution and access to birth control, not just feminism (though the two are linked, and this is one reason birth control is still controversial). The prevalence of unions and worker expectations at this time also meant employers couldn’t just slash wages through the 70s-80s, so the oversupply of workers meant salaries instead stagnated for decades, failing to keep up with inflation as job salaries were worth less and less.
Further, the existence of more workers eventually led to more jobs being created through the 80s-90s, but by this point unions had been mostly broken and worker expectations had dropped to the point that wages still weren’t increasing much, particularly compounded by a relative lack of ambition and entrepreneurship through the 90s-2010s that concentrated power into corporations that were using various economic crises starting in the 00s as excuses to keep wages depressed while paying out obscene executive bonuses instead. Why didn’t more people have enough confidence to start their own business to free themselves from parasitical corporate overlords? My guess: poor parenting from the previous generation due to both parents working.
Also, women tended to gravitate towards administrative and highly-educated work, not so much factory work or construction. This meant men were still building most of the stuff that folks wanted to buy with their salaries. Automation helped pump up production a bit, but mostly the only way to get enough stuff for an economy of more wage-earners was imports. Japanese goods were huge in the 70s and 80s which is why cyberpunk starting in this era had so much Japanese imagery, but China took the role of global factory in the 90s and 00s.
Unfortunately, that meant paying shipping companies and foreign workers, not western workers, so western wages still didn’t increase much. This is why bringing bringing those jobs back, and also limiting immigration, are of interest to politicians, though without much more automation or convincing women to work hard, dirty jobs it won’t help the 2 breadwinners per household problem.
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